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Watch Out for Casting Scams Hopeful beginning actors are unfortunately taken in by crooked casting notice companies. Any company that promises major auditions to non-union unrepresented actors is as crooked as Nigerian emails offering to send you millions in stolen loot. The casting notices look real because real casting notices are stolen and edited to make them appear to be open auditions instead of agent submission only. Often the audition dates are already past and the crooks simply change the date to sometime in the future. The scam offers to send you great audition notices in a "free trial", but requires providing a credit card or checking account to sign up. As soon as they have that they start charging it immediately and won't stop. Legitimate companies such as Breakdown Services send casting notices to agents and managers. ScreenplayLab got a fascinating look inside that business when Breakdown Services President Gary Marsh was a speaker two years ago. Casting notice companies can't offer notices to actors because most of the time casting directors ask them not to. Smaller indie roles (especially non-union) go out to Actors Access (which is part of Breakdown Services), NowCasting, and Mandy. These no-pay/low-pay roles aren't worth an agent's time, so actors submitting themselves makes sense. Actors take these roles for their reel, but often fly-by-night producers never complete their movie and the actors get nothing. Sometimes there are good roles in notices sent to actors, maybe because the casting director didn't like any of the actors submitted by agents.